| Jemima Araminta knew |
| Whenever company |
| Sat round the frugal board, they had |
| Plum marmalade for tea. |
And spiced buns and toothsome tarts, |
| And divers sweets beside, |
| Were set to tempt the appetite |
| With good housewifely pride. |
While walking out one day, it chanced |
| She fell a-pondering sore. |
| A wicked thought in her small mind |
| Did tempt her more and more. |
At all the neighbours' doors she paused, |
| Demure and shy was she. |
| With downcast eyes, she courtesied, |
| And said, "Please come to tea." |
Next day along the garden path, |
| Just as the sun went down, |
| A score of ladies primly walked, |
| Each in her Sabbath gown. |
Surprised, her mother heard them say, |
| "Dear child! So shy is she! |
| What pretty manners she did have |
| When asking us to tea." |
Jemima now remembers well |
| They once had company, |
| Preserves and buns and toothsome tarts |
| When ne'er a taste had she. |
For, supperless, to bed that night, |
| She went, severely chid; |
| No more the neighbours to invite, |
| Save at her mother's bid. |
"Bravo! little girl," cried Mrs. Sherman, while the girls clapped loudly. "Have you anything else with you that you have written? If you have, bring it down with you when you come."
"Yes, godmother," answered Betty, over the banister, blushing until she could feel her cheeks burn. She was all a-tingle at the thought of her godmother seeing her verses. She wanted her to see them, and yet,—she couldn't take down her old ledger for them all to read and criticise. Not for worlds would she have Eugenia read her verses on "Friendship," and there was one about "Dead Hopes" that she felt none of them would understand. They might even laugh at it.
Several minutes went by before she could make up her mind. When she went down-stairs she had put the old ledger back into her trunk and carried only one of the loose leaves in her hands.
"I'll show the others to godmother sometime when we are alone," she said to herself, as she went shyly up to the group waiting for her, "Here is one I called 'Night,'" she said, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment. "There are four verses."
Mrs. Sherman took it, and, glancing down the lines, read aloud the little poem, commencing:
| "Oh, peaceful Night, thou shadowy Queen |
| Who rules the realms of shade, |
| Thy throne is on the heaven's arch, |
| Thy crown of stars is made." |
"Oh, Betty, that's splendid!" cried the girls, in chorus. "How could you think of it?"
"It is remarkably good for a little girl of twelve," said Mrs. Sherman, glancing over the last verses again. "But I am not surprised. Your mother wrote some beautiful things. She scribbled verses all the time."
"Oh, I didn't know that!" cried Betty. "How I wish I could see some of them!"
"You shall, my dear! I have an old portfolio in the library, full of such things. Poems that she wrote and pictures that Joyce's mother drew; caricatures of the professors, the little pen and ink sketches of the places in the Valley we loved the best. I'll get them out for you, after dinner. You will all be interested in them, especially in a journal they kept for me one summer when I was at the seashore. One kept a record of all that happened in the Valley during my absence, and the other illustrated it."
"Dinner is ready now," said Lloyd, jumping up as the maid opened the dining-room door. As they all rose to go in, Mrs. Sherman lingered a moment in the hall, to take the paper from Betty's hand.
"Will you give me this little poem, dear?" she asked, slipping an arm around the child's waist. "I am very proud of my little god-daughter. The world will hear from you some day, if you keep on singing. Just do your bravest and best, and it will be glad to listen to your music."
She stooped and kissed Betty lightly on the forehead. It was as if she had set the seal of her approval upon her, and to be approved by her beautiful godmother,—ah, that meant more to the devoted little heart than any one could dream; far more, even, than if she had been made the proud laureate of a queen.
They were all sitting on the vine-covered porch, looking out between the tall white pillars into the sultry June darkness. The light from the hall lamp streamed across the steps where the four Bobs rolled and tumbled around over each other, but except for that one broad path of light they could see nothing. There was not even starlight.
"How hot and still it is," said Mrs. Sherman. "There doesn't seem to be a leaf stirring, and there's not a star in sight. I think it will surely storm before morning."
"Betty," said Joyce, "your 'shadowy queen who rules the realms of shade' has forgotten to put on her crown. Now if I could write poetry like some people I know, I would write an ode to Night and compare it to a stack of black cats. It wouldn't sound so pretty as your description, but it would be nearer the truth."
"Well, cats or queens, it doesn't make any difference what you call it," said the Little Colonel, "it's the stupidest night I evah saw. I wish something would happen. It seems ages since we have done anything lively. Now that we are ovah the measles it's wastin' time to be sittin' heah so poky and stupid. What can we do, mothah?"
"Let's tell ghost stories," said Mrs. Sherman, who knew what was going to happen in a short time, and wanted to keep the girls occupied until then. "I know a fine one," she began, sinking her voice to a creepy undertone that made the girls cast uneasy glances behind them. "It's all about a haunted house that has clanking chains in the cellar, and muffled footsteps, and icy fingers that c-lutch you by the throat on the stairs as the clock tolls the midnight hour."
"Ugh! How good and spooky!" said Joyce, with a little shiver. "I love that kind."
They drew their chairs around Mrs. Sherman to listen, so interested in the story that two of the Bobs rolled over each other and off the high porch, and nobody noticed their whining. Presently, in the most thrilling part of her story, Mrs. Sherman paused and pointed impressively down the avenue.
"Oo-oo-oo! what is it? Ghosts?" shrieked the Little Colonel, her teeth chattering, and in such haste to throw herself into her mother's arms that her chair turned over with a bang.
"It is a pillow-case party," answered Mrs. Sherman, laughing, "but it is certainly the most ghostly-looking affair that I ever saw."
Down the long avenue toward them came a wavering line of white-sheeted, masked figures. They had square heads, and great round holes for eyes, and the candle that each one carried flashed across a hideous grinning face, whose mouth and nose had been drawn with burnt cork. The leader of this strange procession was a veritable giant,—the Goliath of all the ghosts,—for he loomed up above them to nearly twice the height of the tallest one in the line. It took two sheets to cover him; one flapped about his long thin legs, and one swung from his shoulders, swaying from side to side as he moved noiselessly along with gigantic strides.
"Oh, mothah, it's awful!" whispered the Little Colonel, clinging around Mrs. Sherman's neck.
"It is almost enough to frighten one," she replied. "But they are all friends of yours, Lloyd. For instance, the giant is nobody but your good friend and playfellow, Robby Moore, on stilts; and somewhere in that bunch of little tots at the tail end of the procession are those funny little Cassidy twins, Bethel and Ethel. They begged so hard to be allowed to come that their mother at last consented, although they are only six years old. She said she would dress up in a sheet and pillow-case herself, and come with them, to see that nothing happened to them, so I suppose she is somewhere in the line. I was told that everybody in the neighbourhood was coming; old people as well as children, but I'll leave you to find out for yourself, as the fun of a party like this is in the guessing. They will unmask before they go home."
The procession glided on in silence until it reached the house, and then ranged itself in a long line in front of the group on the porch.
"There are thirty-eight," whispered Joyce. "I counted them. Isn't that one at the end funny? That one in a bolster-case tied at the top, and his hands sticking out of the slits at the sides, like fishes' fins. I'm almost sure that it is Keith. I could tell if I could only see his hands, but he has white stockings drawn over them."
The figures began waving to and fro, faster and faster, until they were all drawn into a weird, uncanny dance, in which each one flapped or writhed or swayed back and forth as he pleased, in ghostly silence. The movements of the ones in the bolster-cases were the most comical, and the little audience on the porch laughed until they could only gasp and hold their sides.
At a signal from the tall leader, the sheeted party suddenly divided, half of the masked faces grinning on one side of the steps, and half going to the other. Then an auction began, one side being sold to the other. The bidding was all in pantomime, and they all looked so much alike that nobody knew whom he was bidding for, or to whom he was knocked down. The giant was the auctioneer.
At last each bidder was provided with a partner, and two by two they all went gravely up the steps to shake hands with Mrs. Sherman and the girls. Every one spoke in an assumed voice, and recognition was almost impossible. The girls talked with every one in turn, but Rob and Keith were the only boys they had recognised when the signal for unmasking was given, and little Bethel Cassidy was the only girl. They knew her queer little lisp.
Cake and sherbet were brought out, and great was everybody's astonishment when masks were slipped off, and the pillow-cases jerked away from the wearers' rumpled hair. To Keith's disgust, he found that the partner whom he had bid for energetically, thinking it was Sally Fairfax, was only his brother Malcolm, and Malcolm teased him all evening by quoting aloud some of the complimentary speeches Keith had whispered to him under cover of their disguises.
"Oh, gracious!" roared Malcolm. "It was too funny; Keith, fanning me with one of those stubby little stocking-covered fins of his, and making complimentary speeches about my eyes. Told me he would know them anywhere. And he spouted poetry, he did," added Malcolm, doubling up with another laugh. "Oh, it was too good! Hi, Buddy," chucking Keith under the chin, "are you of the same opinion still? Ain't they pretty, 'mine eyes so blue and tender?'"
"Aw, hush!" growled Keith, in a shamefaced sort of way, adding, in a savage undertone, "I'll make black eyes of 'em if you don't stop."
That was not the only odd assortment of partners, for Miss Allison had bid for plump little Mrs. Cassidy, thinking it was one of the boys in her Sunday school class; and one little maid of seven found that an old bachelor uncle had fallen to her lot.
"You see we made a wholesale affair of it," said Miss Allison to Eugenia. "We drove around the neighbourhood in two big wagonettes, and picked up whole families at a time."
"It is the jolliest surprise I ever saw," answered Eugenia, looking all around at the little groups laughing and talking over their refreshments. "It is hard to tell which are having the best time, the children or the grown people; they are all mixed up together."
As she spoke the buzz of voices ceased, for there was a sudden blinding flash of lightning and a loud peal of thunder that made the windows rattle. The storm which Mrs. Sherman had predicted would come before morning, had crept up unnoticed, and caught them unawares.
"Come inside!" cried Mrs. Sherman, as, with a furious rush and roar the wind swept across them, banging window shutters, whirling leaves and gravel in their faces, and lashing the trees until they were bent almost double. Another blinding glare of lightning followed, with such a crash of thunder that Eugenia put her fingers in her ears and screamed, and Betty hid her face in her hands.
"Hurry!" cried Mrs. Sherman. "I am afraid that some of these flying shingles, or whatever they are, will hurt some one. It is almost a cyclone."
Breathless and excited, they all hurried into the house, and banged the great front door in the face of the storm. The children tumbled into the drawing-room, the smaller ones huddling in a frightened heap in the middle of the floor, until the fury of the storm was over. There was nothing to do but wait with bated breath after each vivid flash of lightning for the terrific crash that always followed, and listen to the wind outside as it fought with the sturdy tree-tops. Now and then a limb snapped in the fierce struggle, and fell to the ground with a loud crackling noise.
"I hope there will be enough of a roof left over our heads to shelter us," said Mrs. Sherman, as bricks from the chimney tops began rolling down the roof and falling to the ground below with heavy thuds.
"We expected to start home about this time," Miss Allison was saying. "We ordered the wagonettes to come back for us at ten o'clock, but it looks now as if we are storm-bound for the night. Did you ever hear such a downpour?"
"It's the clatter of the rain on the tin roof of the porch," answered Mrs. Sherman, speaking at the top of her voice in order to be heard above the deafening din of the rain and wind.
For nearly half an hour they sat waiting for the storm to pass. Several games were proposed, but none of the children wanted to play. They seemed to feel more comfortable when they were snuggled up close against some grown person, or holding some elderly protecting hand. But gradually the lightning grew fainter and fainter, and the thunder went growling away in the distance, although the rain kept steadily on. Mrs. Sherman called for some music in the drawing-room, and while Miss Allison and Mrs. Cassidy played the liveliest duets they knew, the children drifted out into the hall and over the house as they pleased.
Most of the older boys and girls sat on the stairs in groups of twos and threes, while from the upper hall the scurry of feet, and the singsong cry that London Bridge was falling down, showed what the little ones were playing. It was after eleven o'clock when the wagonettes came rumbling up to the door. The rain had stopped, and a few stars were beginning to struggle through the clouds.
"How cold and damp it is!" exclaimed Mrs. Sherman, as she stepped out on the front porch. "The thermometer must have fallen twenty degrees since you came. You will all need wraps of some kind. Wait till I can get you some shawls and things."
"No, indeed!" every one protested. "We will wrap up in our sheets again. We do not need anything else."
There was a laughing scrimmage over the pile of sheets that had been thrown hastily into one corner of the hall, when the party ran in out of the storm. Nearly all the masks and pillow-cases were put on again, too, so that the party broke up in laughing confusion. Nobody recognised his neighbour or knew who he was bumping against as he hurried up to bid his perplexed hostess good night.
With a great cracking of whips and creaking of wheels the spectral party drove off, to the tune of "Good-night, ladies, we're going to leave you now." Far down the road the chorus came floating back to the listeners on the porch, "Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along."
"Wasn't it funny?" yawned Lloyd, as she went sleepily up the stairs. "But oh, I'm so tiahed. I believe if they had stayed much longah, I'd have fallen ovah in a heap on the flo'."
All the lights were out down-stairs, and the girls were nearly undressed, when they were surprised to hear one of the wagonettes coming back. A frantic clang of the knocker on the front door brought them all to the windows.
"Oh, Mrs. Sherman!" cried an agonised voice out of the darkness, that they recognised as Mrs. Cassidy's, "are the twins here? Bethel and Ethel? We can't find them anywhere. I was sure that I lifted them into the wagonette myself, but every one was so disguised that I must have mistaken somebody else's children for mine."
"They are not in either wagonette," added Rob Moore's voice. "We never thought to count noses until we reached the Cassidy place, and then we found they were missing."
Hastily slipping into a wrapper, Mrs. Sherman ran down-stairs with a candle in her hand, and opened the front door. Plump little Mrs. Cassidy was standing there, wringing her hands.
"Oh, don't tell me that they are not here!" she cried. "Didn't you see them when you were locking up the house after we left? Then I know they're lost. They must have slipped away from the porch before the storm came up, and were playing outside somewhere when we all ran inside and shut the door. Oh, my babies!" she wailed. "If they were out in all that awful storm it has killed them, I know. Oh, why did I do such a foolish thing as to bring them? They were too little to come, I knew that. But they begged so hard, and they looked so cute in those little ruffled pillow-cases, that I hadn't the heart to refuse. Oh, what shall I do?"
"They must be somewhere about the house," said Mrs. Sherman, with such decision that Mrs. Cassidy was comforted, and began wiping her eyes.
"Come in, and help me search. Maybe they slipped up-stairs when the other children were playing, and went to sleep in some dark corner. Come on, boys. Light up the house from attic to cellar, and see who will be first to find them. It will be a game of hunt the twins, instead of hunt the slipper."
Then up-stairs, and down-stairs, and in my lady's chamber, went a strange procession, for nearly every one was still draped in sheet and pillow-case. Into closets, behind screens, in all the corners, and under all the beds they looked. Keith, remembering the sad story of Ginevra, even lifted the lid of every chest and trunk in the linen room. Poor little Mrs. Cassidy followed, wringing her hands, and sobbing that she knew that they had been shut outside in the storm and the night. Suddenly, when they had been all over the house for the third time, she caught up a lamp, and ran out in the dark, like some poor mad creature, calling, "Oh, Bethel! Oh, my little Ethel! Don't you hear your mother?"
By this time, the servants' quarters were aroused, and Mrs. Sherman, now really alarmed, called for Walker and Alec to bring lanterns. The lawn was a wreck, strewn with leaves and fallen limbs and pieces of broken flower urns that had been overturned by the wind. The searchers stumbled over them as they waded through the wet grass, looking in every nook and corner where it was possible for a child to have strayed, but their search was in vain. Never a trace did they find of the lost twins.
"Stay in the house, girls," said Mrs. Sherman, as she caught up the trail of her wrapper, and ran out to follow the flickering lanterns and Mrs. Cassidy's frantic cries. "It might give you your death of cold to expose yourselves so soon after the measles."
As they stood in the door watching the wavering lights, Lloyd exclaimed, "The puppies are gone, too. I wonder where they can be. Maybe they were left outside in the storm when we all ran indoors in such a hurry. Maybe the twins were playing with them."
She leaned out of the door, peering into the night. "Heah, Bob!" she called, snapping her fingers, and whistling the shrill signal she always gave when she fed them. There was no response from the darkness outside, and she turned indoors repeating the whistle, and calling, "Heah, Bob! Heah, puppy! Come to yo' miss!"
In answer there was a stir under the low Persian couch in the library, then a whine, and an inquiring little nose was thrust through the heavy knotted fringe that draped the lower part of the couch. The next instant Lloyd's Bob came sprawling joyously toward her, his pink bow cocked rakishly over one ear. Lloyd dropped on her knees, and, lifting the fringe, looked under. Then she gave an excited scream.
"Heah they are!" she called. "I've found them! Heah's the twins, and all the Bobs!"
"They're found!" called Joyce, running out on the porch and shouting the news until the searchers farthest from the house heard, and ran joyfully back. "They're found! Lloyd's found them!"
"Who ever would have thought of squeezing into such a place as that?" said Miss Allison, as she came running in, out of breath. "I started to look under that couch twice, but it was so low I thought they couldn't possibly have crawled under. Besides, some one was sitting on it all evening, and they surely would have been seen if they had attempted it."
Rob and Malcolm lifted the couch and set it aside, and there, curled up on two fat sofa cushions, with the puppies beside them, lay the twins fast asleep. Great beads of perspiration stood on their foreheads and trickled down their dimpled faces. Their hair curled in little wet rings all over their heads, and their chubby arms and necks were red with prickly heat.
"It is a wonder that they weren't smothered," cried Mrs. Cassidy, taking them up in her arms and waking them with her tearful kisses. "Oh, why did you hide away from mother, precious?" she asked, reproachfully, as Bethel's eyes opened with a dazed stare at the crowd of faces around her. She leaned her head heavily on her mother's shoulder, for she was not fully awake, and clung around her neck with both arms. Finally, in answer to the chorus of questions that came from all sides, she roused enough to answer.
"It lightened, that's why we hid. Mammy Chloe thed if you go get in a dark plathe on a pile of featheths, no lightnin' can hurt you. Mammy Chloe always puth uth in the middle of her feather-bed. Tho me and thithter took a thofa pillow and got under the thofa and shut our eyeth tight. We wath hot," she added, gravely, "and tho wath the puppieth, but the lightnin' couldn't get uth."
The laugh that went up from the amused listeners aroused both the twins so thoroughly that they joined in without knowing what they were laughing about. Then Alec and Walker carried them triumphantly on their shoulders to the wagonette, and once more the party started homeward. This time they moved off without singing, but from the gate came back three cheers for the twins, then three cheers for the Little Colonel, who had found them. Once started to cheering, somebody proposed three for the pillow-case party, and so lustily did they give them, that an old rooster, awakening from sleep as the wheels creaked by, thought it the call of some giant chanticleer, and promptly crowed an answering challenge, that was echoed by every cock in the Valley.
It seemed to Betty that that night would never end. It was after midnight before the house grew quiet. Then, whenever she closed her eyes, she could see those ghostly figures dancing before her in a long, white wavering line. After awhile she gave up the attempt to sleep, and lay with her eyes wide open, staring into the darkness, alert, and quivering at the slightest sound.
"I don't know what makes me so nervous," she thought. "I feel as if I should fly, and the dark seems so horrible, as if it was full of creepy, crawling things, with horns and claws."
A beetle boomed against the window, striking the pane with a heavy thud. She drew the sheet over her head and shivered. "Maybe if I'd read awhile it would make me sleepy," she thought, and, slipping softly out of bed, she groped her way across the room in the dark to the dressing-table. Lighting a candle in one of the crystal candlesticks that always reminded her of twisted icicles, she put it on a stand beside her bed. The light flickered unsteadily, but she piled the pillows up behind her and settled herself to read.
It was a new book that she was greatly interested in, and before long she was so deep in the story that she never noticed how the time was flying. Instead of bringing sleep to her eyes, it seemed to drive it farther and farther away. The candle burned lower and lower, but she never noticed it, and read on by its unsteady light until she heard the hall clock strike four. The candle was flickering in its socket, and the June dawn was beginning to streak the sky. Her eyes smarted and burned, and ached with a dull throbbing pain.
She turned over and went to sleep then, and slept so heavily that she did not hear the noises of the awakening household. Once Mrs. Sherman came to the door and peeped in, but, finding her asleep, tiptoed out again. It was nearly noon when she awoke, feeling as tired as when she went to bed. She dressed languidly and went down-stairs, but was so unlike her usually sunny self, that Mrs. Sherman watched her anxiously. Late in the afternoon she sent for Doctor Fuller, and a general wail went up when he announced what was the matter with her.
"More measles, Mrs. Sherman," he said, cheerfully. "Well, this is the most extraordinary house party I ever heard of. You seem to be exceedingly partial to this one line of amusements."
"It isn't fair for Betty to have it," exclaimed Joyce, "when she wouldn't go to the camp, and she's had it before! It's just too bad!"
"We'll all have to be mighty good to her," said the Little Colonel, "for she was so sweet about amusing us. We'll take turns reading to her and entertaining her, for she stayed hours with us in that dark room when she could have been outdoors enjoying herself."
"That is probably the reason she is laid up now," answered the doctor. "She should have kept entirely away from you."
"But she had had one case," explained Mrs. Sherman, "and we never dreamed of her having another. Poor little thing! I hope this will be light. She had a hard time before, so we must make a regular frolic of this, girls."
"Well, no, madam, at least not for several days," said the doctor, gravely, "And you must be extremely careful about her eyes. They seem to be badly affected, and I must warn you that they are really in danger."
They told Betty that afterward, thinking it would stop her crying, when everything else failed to do so, if she realised how necessary it was for her not to inflame them with her tears. Usually she was a sensible little body, obedient to the slightest suggestion, but now she lay curled up in a disconsolate little heap in bed, sobbing as if her heart would break.
"Oh, I don't want to have the measles!" she sobbed, catching her breath in great gasps. "Oh, I don't want to!"
"My dear little girl, don't let it distress you so!" begged Mrs. Sherman, leaning over and tenderly wiping the flushed little face.
"It will not be any worse for you than for the other girls, and in a few days when you feel better we are going to have all sorts of sport out of it. The girls are planning now what they shall do to make up to you for this disappointment. They feel as if they are to blame for bringing this illness upon you by their disobedience, and you cannot imagine how bad it makes them feel to have you take it to heart so bitterly."
But even that failed to stop her tears, and presently Mrs. Sherman went out into the hall, where the girls were waiting for her.
"There is some reason for all this distress that I am unable to discover," she said. "Joyce, maybe if you would go in and talk to her you might find out."
"She must be lots worse than we were," whispered Eugenia to Lloyd, as the high, shrill voice, so unlike Betty's usual tones, went on complainingly in the next room.
"Hush!" warned Lloyd. "She's telling Joyce what the matter is." The words came out to them distinctly. She was speaking with a nervous quickness as if her fever had almost reached delirium.
"I was trying to dig one of those roads," wailed Betty, in a high, querulous voice. "One that would last for ever, don't you know? like the one they built for Tusitala. You do know, don't you?" she insisted, feverishly, but Joyce had to acknowledge that she had never heard of it, and Betty cried again, because she felt too nervous and ill to explain.
"There, there! never mind!" said Joyce, soothingly, thinking that Betty's mind was wandering. "You can tell me all about it when you get well."
"But I want you to know now!" sobbed Betty, with all the unreasoning impatience of a sick child. "It is all in my 'Good times book.' I cut it out of an old Youth's Companion, just after I came, and the piece is inside the cover of that little white and gold book in the writing-desk. Read it, won't you? Then you will understand."
Joyce took the slip of paper to the window, and glanced rapidly along the lines.
"No, read it aloud!" demanded Betty, fretfully. "I want to hear it, too. It is such a sweet story, and I read it over every day to help me remember."
Mrs. Sherman and the girls, sitting outside the door, leaned forward to
listen, as Joyce read aloud the newspaper clipping that Betty counted
among her chief treasures. This is what they heard:
"THE ROAD OF THE LOVING HEART."[1]
"Remembering the great love of his highness, Tusitala, and his loving care when we were in prison and sore distressed, we have prepared him an enduring present, this road which we have dug for ever."
In a far-off island, thousands of miles from the mainland, and unconnected with the world by cable, stands this inscription. It was set up at the corner of a new road, cut through a tropical jungle, and bears at its head the title of this article, signed by the names of ten prominent chiefs. This is the story of the road, and why it was built:
Some years ago a Scotchman, broken in health and expecting an early death, sought out this lonely spot, because here the climate was favourable to the disease from which he suffered. He settled here for what remained to him of life.
He bought an estate of several hundred acres, and threw himself earnestly into the life of the natives of the island. There was great division among the many chiefs, and prolonged warfare. Very soon the chiefs found that this alien from a strange land was their best friend. They began coming to him for counsel, and invited him to their most important conferences.
Though he did not bear that name, he became a missionary to them. He was their hero, and they loved and trusted him because he tried to lead them aright. They had never had such a friend. And so it came about that when the wars ceased, the chiefs of both sides called him by a name of their own, and made him one of their own number, thus conferring upon him the highest honour within their power.
But many of the chiefs were still in prison, because of their political views or deeds, and in constant danger of being put to death. Their sole friend was the Scotchman, whom they called Tusitala. He visited them, comforted them, repeated passages from the history of Christ to them, and busied himself incessantly to effect their release.
At length he obtained their freedom, and then, glowing with gratitude, in despite of age, decrepitude, and loss of strength, they started directly for the estate of their benefactor, and there, in the terrible heat, they laboured for weeks in building him a road which they knew he had long desired. Love conquered weakness, and they did not cease their toil until their handiwork, which they called "The Road of the Loving Heart," was finished.
Not long after this the white chief suddenly died. At the news the native chiefs flocked from all parts of the island to the house, and took charge of the body. They kissed his hand as they came in, and all night sat in silence about him. One of them, a feeble old man, threw himself on his knees beside the body of his benefactor, and cried out between his sobs:
"I am only a poor black man, and ignorant. Yet I am not afraid to come and take the last look of my dead friend's face. Behold, Tusitala is dead. We were in prison and he cared for us. The day was no longer than his kindness. Who is there so great as Tusitala? Who is there more loving-compassionate? What is your love to his love?"
So the chiefs took their friend to the top of a steep mountain which he had loved, and there buried him. It was a mighty task.
The civilised world mourns the great author. The name of Robert Louis Stevenson is lastingly inwrought into English literature. But the Samoans mourn in his loss a brother, who outdid all others in loving-kindness, and so long as the island in the Pacific exists, Tusitala will be gratefully remembered, not because he was so greatly gifted, but because he was a good man.
The phrase, "The Road of the Loving Heart," is a gospel in itself. "The day is not longer than his kindness" is a new beatitude. Fame dies, and honours perish, but "loving-kindness" is immortal.
[1] Editorial in old copy of Youth's Companion.
Joyce finished and looked up inquiringly. She still did not see what connection the road could have with Betty's distress over the measles.
"Now, don't you see?" asked Betty, tremulously, "It is for godmother that I wanted to build that road, for ever since I came she has been like Tusitala to me. 'The day is no longer than her kindness.' Oh, Joyce, nobody knows how good she has been to me!" Then between her sobs she told Joyce again the story of the gold beads, and the many things her godmother had done to make her visit a continual delight. Mrs. Sherman, outside the door, felt her eyes grow dim and her cheeks wet, as the child babbled on, reciting a long list of little kindnesses that she had treasured in her memory, and that her godmother had either done unconsciously, or had forgotten long ago.
It showed how hungry the poor little heart had been, that such trifles could make it brim over with gratitude. She wiped her eyes more than once as the voice went on.
"Of course I couldn't dig a road like those chiefs did, and she wouldn't have wanted one, even if I could; but I thought maybe I could leave a memory behind me when this beautiful visit is done, that would be like a smooth, white road. You know remembering things is like looking back over a road. At least it always seemed that way to me, and the unpleasant things that have happened are like the stones and rocks that we stumble over. But if there haven't been any unpleasant things to remember, then we can look back and see it stretched out behind us, all smooth and white and shining.
"So I tried from the very first of my visit to leave nothing behind me for her memory to stumble over; not a frown, a cross word, or a single disobedience. That's why I wouldn't go with you that day to have my fortune told. It would have spoiled my 'Road of the Loving Heart,' and put a stone in it that would always have made godmother sorry when she thought of my visit.
"That's why I came back from the picnic at the old mill and missed the charades. It would have spoiled the road if I hadn't kept my promise,—kept it to the utmost. And now after all the days I have tried so hard, it is going to be spoiled because I've gone and got sick. I'll be so much care and trouble that the Memory Road will be all spoiled—my 'Road of the Loving Heart!'"
Betty was so exhausted by this time, that she was not crying any longer; but now and then a long sob shook the little body from head to foot. Joyce, not knowing what to say, slipped away and went out into the hall.
"So that is the cause of the child's distress," whispered Mrs. Sherman. "Bless her little heart, now I've found out what is the matter, maybe I can succeed in quieting her."
What she said to comfort her the girls never knew, for the door closed behind her and they stole away to their own rooms.
But presently they heard the "White Seal's Lullaby" sung softly within. She had taken Betty in her arms, and was rocking her as tenderly as she had rocked the Little Colonel, while she sang, "Oh, hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us."
When Betty fell asleep it was in the embrace of something far more comforting and restful than the "arms of the slow-swinging seas." For the first time in her life since she could remember, she felt what it was to be folded fast in the mother-love that she had always longed for.
"Oh, isn't it awful!" exclaimed the Little Colonel, in a shocked tone, and with such a look of horror in her face that Eugenia leaned forward to listen. Lloyd was speaking to Joyce on the porch just outside of the library window, where Eugenia sat reading.
"What is awful?" asked Eugenia, her curiosity aroused by the expression of the girls' faces.
"Sh!" whispered Lloyd, warningly, as she tiptoed to the window and sat down on the broad, low sill. "I am afraid Betty will hear us talking about her. The doctor has just been here, and he says—oh, Eugenia, it is too terrible to tell—he says he is afraid that Betty is going blind!"
The tears stood in the Little Colonel's eyes. "You know that people do lose their sight sometimes when they have the measles, and her eyes have been the worst part of it from the start. The night before the measles broke out on her she read till nearly morning by candle-light, because she was restless and couldn't go to sleep. Of course that made them worse."
"Blind!" echoed Eugenia, closing her own eyes a moment on the bright summer world without, and feeling a chill run over her, as she realised what black dungeon walls those five letters could build around a life.
"Was the doctor sure, Lloyd? Can't something be done?"
"Of co'se he wasn't suah. I heard him tell mothah that he wouldn't give up fighting for her sight as long as there was a shadow of a chance to save it, but he advised her to send for an oculist to consult with him, and she's just now telephoned to the city for one."
"Does Betty know it?"
"She knows that there is dangah of her losing her sight, and is tryin' so hahd to be quiet and patient."
Eugenia laid down her book, feeling faint and sick. For a long time after Lloyd and Joyce had left her she sat idly playing with the curtain cord, thinking over what they had told her. Presently she tiptoed up-stairs to her room. She stood a moment outside Betty's door, listening, for Betty was talking to Eliot, and she wanted to hear what a person with such a prospect staring her in the face would have to say.
"There are lots of beautiful things in the world to think about, Eliot," Betty was saying bravely, in her sweet, cheery little voice.
"'Specially when you've lived in the country and have all the big outdoors to remember. Now while I'm so hot I love to count up all the cool things I can remember. I like to pretend that I'm down in the orchard, way early in the morning, with a fresh breeze blowing through the apple-blossoms and the dewdrops shining on every blade of grass. Oh, it smells so fresh and sweet and delicious! Now I'm in the corn-fields and the tall green corn is rustling in the wind, and the morning-glories climb up every stalk and shake the dew out of their purple bells. Now I can hear the bucket splash down in the well, and come up cold and dripping. And now I'm dabbling my fingers in the spring down in the old stone spring house, and standing on the cold, wet rocks in my bare feet. And there's the winter mornings, Eliot, when the trees are covered with sleet till every twig twinkles like a diamond. And the frost on the window-panes—oh, if I could only lay my face against the cold glass now, how good it would feel!"
Eugenia could bear no more. She turned away from the door, and, meeting Mrs. Sherman on the threshold of her room, threw herself into her arms, sobbing: "Oh, Cousin Elizabeth, I can't stand it. If Betty goes blind it will be all my fault! She never would have had the measles if it hadn't been for me. But I would go, and I made the others go, too. And when Betty refused I was so mean and hateful to her! Oh, Cousin Elizabeth, what can I do?"
Mrs. Sherman drew Eugenia into her room and comforted her the best she could, but her own heart was heavy. She knew that Doctor Fuller had little hope of saving Betty's sight.
That knowledge threw a shadow over the entire household. The great oculist came, and gravely shook his head over the case. "There is one chance that she may see again," he said, "one in a hundred. That is all. Now if she could have a trained nurse who could watch her eyes constantly and follow directions to the letter—"
"She shall have anything!" interrupted Mrs. Sherman. "Everything that would help in the smallest degree."
"And it would be best not to let the child know," he continued. "It would probably excite her, and, above all things, that must be guarded against."
But Betty, lying with bandaged eyes, caught a whisper, felt the suppressed sympathy in the atmosphere, as one feels the tingle of electricity in the air before a storm, and began to guess the truth. When the trained nurse came and gave such careful attention to the treatment of her eyes, she was sure of it. But she said nothing of her suspicions, and they thought she had none.
One day Lloyd came into the room with a newspaper in her hand. Eugenia and Joyce followed softly. Lloyd tried to speak calmly, but there was a suppressed excitement in her voice as she exclaimed, "Betty, I've got the loveliest thing to show you. Mothah said I might be the one to tell, 'cause I'm so glad and proud, I don't know what to do. You know that little poem that you gave to mothah, called 'Night?' Well, she sent it away to an editah, and he has published it in this papah with yo' name at the bottom,—Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis! Now aren't you stuck up? We are all so proud of you we don't know what to do."
Betty stretched out one trembling hand for the paper, and involuntarily the other went up to her eyes to push away the bandages. "Let me see it," she cried, eagerly, but the thrill of gladness in her voice died in a pitiful little note of despair as she whispered, brokenly, "Oh, I forgot! I can't see!"
But the next instant her hand was groping for the paper again. "Where is it?" she asked. "Let me feel it, anyway. Oh, to think that something I have written has really been published! Where is it, Lloyd? Put my hand on the spot, please. You don't know how glad I am, how glad and thankful. I have always wanted to write—always hoped that some day, after I had tried years and years, I might be able to do something good enough to be published, but to have it come now while I am a little girl,"—her voice sunk almost to a whisper,—"oh, Lloyd you don't know how wonderful it seems to me!"
She was trembling so that the paper shook in her hands. "Where is it?" she asked again, feeling blindly over the page.
"There," said Lloyd, placing the little groping finger on a spot at the head of a column. "There is the word NIGHT, and heah," guiding her fingers down the page, "heah is yo' name. If I were you I'd be so stuck up I wouldn't speak to common people that can't have verses published in the papah."
"But—oh—if you couldn't—see—it!" Betty's words came in choking little gasps. She paused a moment and turned her face away, swallowing hard. Then she went on more calmly.
"Wasn't it queer that I should have written about Night, just before mine begun? That the only thing I shall ever have published should be called that? My long, long night! But there are no stars in this night. Lloyd, it's awful to think you'll always be in the dark!"
Lloyd turned with a startled glance to the other girls.
"I—I don't know what you mean," she stammered.
"Yes, you do," insisted Betty. "What you've been trying to keep from me, all of you, that I am always going to be—blind!"
She ended the sentence with a little shiver, and, choking with sobs, turned her face to the wall. At a sign from the nurse, Lloyd slipped away and ran to her mother's room. She found Eugenia already there, with her head buried in Mrs. Sherman's lap.
"Oh, it almost broke my heart!" she was saying. "To see those poor little fingers groping over the paper feeling for the poem that she couldn't see. And she said so pitifully, 'My long, long night! There are no stars in this night!' And to think it's all my fault! Oh, it is just killing me! I could hardly sleep last night for thinking of it, and when I did I had a dreadful nightmare.
"I dreamed that I was in a great market-place going from stall to stall, trying to buy something, but I had forgotten what it was I wanted. A horrid grinning little dwarf, with great fangs in his jaw, like a boar's tusks, followed me everywhere, carrying my purse. I'd stand awhile in front of every stall, trying to remember what it was I'd come for, and when I'd thought awhile I'd cry out, 'Now I know what I want, give me my own way. It is my own way that I want.' Everybody in the market would stop to listen, and the man behind the counter would say, 'Not unless you can pay the price.'
"Then that horrible dwarf would step up, grinning, his old tusks showing all hideous and yellow, and say, 'Here is the price! Give her her own way. Here is the price. Let the whole world see the price that she has paid for her own way,—Betty's eyes is the price. Betty's beautiful brown eyes!' And then he would hold them out in his ugly knotted hand, and they would look up at me so reproachfully, that I would scream and tear my hair. I don't know how many times I had to go through that scene in my sleep, but when I got up this morning I was as tired as if I had been running all night, and every place I turn I can see that hideous old hand thrust out at me with Betty's brown eyes in it. I'll never insist on having my own way again."
There was no time for Mrs. Sherman to comfort Eugenia then, for Betty needed her, and in answer to the nurse's summons she hurried away to soothe the child, sorely distressed by this turn that the house party had taken.
"Go out on the ponies for awhile," she said, as she left the three girls sitting disconsolately on the floor. "Go out and get some of this summer sunshine into your faces and voices so that you can bring it back to Elizabeth. She will need all that you can bring her, poor child; so, instead of brooding over your own feelings, think of something that you can do to cheer her up."
In a little while there was a clatter of ponies' hoofs down the avenue, and Mrs. Sherman, sitting by the window in Betty's room, waved her hand to Eugenia, Joyce, and the Little Colonel as they rode away. They were gone all morning, and when they came back the June sunshine had done its work. Their faces were bright and smiling, and they giggled continuously as they bumped into each other, running up the stairs.
Betty's door was open, and to their surprise they heard a little laugh as they stopped to peep in. She was lying back among the pillows with bandaged eyes, but there was a smile on her lips.
"Come in, girls," she cried. "Godmother and I are making alphabet rhymes. We started at A, and have been taking turns. She has just made a good one: 'P is a pie-man, portly and proud, pugnaciously prattling'—What's the rest of it, godmother? You tell them. I have forgotten."
But Mrs. Sherman's rhyme was broken short in an astonished exclamation, as her glance fell on the Little Colonel.
"Why, Lloyd Sherman!" she cried. "What have you been doing? Your dress is torn to tatters, and you are so dirty and dusty that I can scarcely believe that you are my child!"
The Little Colonel screwed herself around to look at the back of her dress-skirt, which was torn into a dozen ragged strips, and fluttered behind her in long fringes. There was a three-cornered tear on the shoulder and a hole in the elbow of her sleeve.
"Reckon I must have toah it gettin' through a bobwiah fence," she answered, cheerfully. "But, look at Eugenia! She's as much of a sight as I am, with her hair hangin' all in her eyes, like an ole witch, and that scratch across her face, and her stockings full of burrs."
"Joyce is nearly as bad!" cried Eugenia; "both hair ribbons gone, the heel lost off one shoe, grass stains on her dress, and her face red as a turkey gobbler's, from running so fast."
"Where have you all been, and what have you been doing?" demanded Mrs. Sherman so emphatically that, with much giggling and exclaiming, they all began to talk at once.
"We met the boys ovah on the pike," began the Little Colonel, "Malcolm and Keith and Robby, and we were all ridin' along as polite as anything, when the boys began to tell about the good times they used to have playin' Indian."
"But first," interrupted Joyce, "Keith told about the time they tied his little cousin Ginger to a tree in the woods, and left her there until it was so dark she nearly had a spasm."
"Yes," said Eugenia, "and I said what a pity it was that we were too old to play Indian; that I had had the blues all day, and felt that nothing would do me so much good as to get out some place where nobody could hear, and yell and carry on at the top of my voice. And Malcolm said that, just for once, supposing we'd pretend like we were ten years old, instead of thirteen, and pitch in and have a good ripping, tearing old game of Indian. It was away up the pike, where there was nothing in sight but a few farmhouses, scattered along the road, and it didn't seem as if it would make any difference, so we said we would."
"First thing I knew," broke in Joyce, "Robby Moore gave an outlandish war-whoop right in my ear, that nearly deafened me, and grabbed me by my hair, yelling he was going to tomahawk me. And I saw Eugenia go sailing up the road as fast as her horse could carry her, with Keith after her, swinging on to those two long black braids of hers. You see Lloyd had the advantage of us with her short hair. They couldn't scalp her so easily; but Malcolm chased after her like all possessed."
"Maybe you think it wasn't excitin'," said the Little Colonel. "I felt like a real suah 'nuff Indian was aftah me, and I screeched bloody murdah till you could have heard me almost to the old mill."
"I should say she did!" giggled Joyce. "The way Tarbaby got over the ground was something to remember, and the way Lloyd yelled would have made a wild coyote take to its heels. Just as we got in sight of the toll-gate, we met one of those big three-story huckster-wagons, full of chickens and ducks and things. You know how funny they always look, with so many bills and legs and tails sticking through the slats. Well, the horses shied as we went dashing up to them, and first thing we knew they had backed that wagon into a ditch at the side of the road, and one of the coops went off the top ke-bang! into the ditch."
"You never saw anything madder than that old huckster," interrupted Eugenia. "He jumped down off the wagon, and came up to us with a big whip in his hands, scolding, as cross as two sticks. But he couldn't stay angry with those boys. They were so polite, and apologised, and said if they had done anything wrong they wanted to make it right. They offered to pay for the coop if it was broken, and got off their horses to help him lift it on to the wagon again. But when they took hold of it three chickens flopped out of the broken side, and went squawking across the fields."
"It was so funny!" laughed Lloyd. "There they went, legs stretching, wings flapping, lickety split! It made me think of Papa Jack's story about the old witch: 'she ran, she flew, she ran, she flew!' We all told the old huckstah we'd help him catch them and that's why we got so dirty."